Abstract [en]

The meeting and conference industry is very varied, and conference designers strive to optimise the resources used during an event or conference. During several years of working in the conference and meeting industry the author found that some tasks associated with meetings and conferences are still handled manually. It was from the experience of these sometimes labour-intensive tasks that the idea sprung to introduce computer support. This thesis describes the development of a prototype in a mobile environment using Near Field Communication (NFC) as an identification token for an attendee at a conference or meeting. The conference centre where the conference and meeting scenario incorporated in the developed prototype is gathered from the author’s current place of work. As the prototype is developed as proof-of-concept it is not complete and needs to be developed further in order to be of use for a conference designer. The gain in reduced work can in some cases be quite intuitive, and in some other cases needs to be analysed. During the development of the prototype the author gained new knowledge in how mobile operating systems (OS) can differ compared to developing for OS aimed for stationary computers. One key difference was that the OS could at any time close or pause the application in order to free or save resources, such as memory or power, this behaviour needs to be managed and taken into consideration when developing for mobile OS. The author also learned how to use NFC and develop applications using NFC with an attendee-driven approach, which is important as the meeting industry strives to reduce the use of resources by making it more attendee-driven. The main idea behind the attendee-driven approach is to shift the tasks that are normally handled by the arranger of the conference, over to the conference attendee, e.g, the conference attendee books his or her lecture online, reducing the need of staff at a reservation call center.